Culture Heroes: Sarah Parcak

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.

Culture Heroes: Sarah Parcak

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.

Sarah: Thank you all. My work initially started with using satellite imagery to map ancient landscapes. I've been working in Egypt for 15 years. I have to say that I never expected to be doing looting mapping. But I got started almost at the beginning of my PhD work.

The site you see in the lower left-hand corner, is called Tel El-Tabila. It's located in the northeast Egyptian Delta about two hours to the northeast of Cairo. It's a multi-period archaeological site. Dates to primarily to the late period, so roughly 600 BC. When the Napoleonic Expedition visited Egypt in the 1800s, the site was fairly large. Over 1000 by 1000 meters in size. Over time, due to agricultural growth and encroachment, the site has been decreasing and decreasing in size, and you can actually see just how much the site has shrunk in the last 200 years. This is one site in Egypt, and look at the number of square meters - it's shrunk. And we've been able to track this using old maps, old spy photographs from the 1960s, declassified information, aerial photographs, as well as satellite imagery.

And as I continued with my thesis research, I realized that this was not just the story at Tel El-Tabila. This is the story of many, if not all, of Egypt's archaeological sites. And this is not just the story of Egypt. This is something that's going on all over the world. Of course my work focuses in Egypt, but we're beginning to do work in other countries, and this is a global problem. So that's the take-away I want you to have today, is that this is something that is going on all over the world, and we now have the technology, tools, and resources to map the problem and begin to strategize about ways of stopping it. Because ours is truly the last generation that will be able to do something about it before these sites are gone forever.

When we think of Egypt, of course we always think of Egypt's greatest discovery, that of the tomb of King Tut. But what's interesting, and no one really knows this, is that the tomb of King Tut was not totally intact, it had actually been looted in antiquity. That's something else that we need to bring up. A lot of looting that goes on on archaeological sites, this is not a modern phenomenon, this is something that's been going on. This is a very human trait. When Howard Carter opened King Tut's tomb, and looked at the vessels that contained unguents - ancient perfumes and creams, there were actually finger marks. You have to think, if you're going to take something from King Tut's tomb and you walk into the market with a gold scarab with King Tut's name on it, people are going to wonder where it came from. Versus a handful of an unguent that you can easily sell on. I'm just bringing that up as an example to show that there's a great history of this going on in Egypt.

In January of 2011, my career changed quite a bit. Following the Egyptian revolution, we started hearing rumors of archaeological sites being looted. We didn't know what was rumor and what was truth. Of course everyone here knows about the Cairo museum, with objects being taken. The Egyptian government has done an incredible job in tracking these objects down. They've managed to find many of the objects that were taken, and they're actually going on display at the Cairo museum. With support from National Geographic, as well as Digital Globe, they're a very large provider of high-resolution satellite data, we were able to get a hold of satellite images showing that there was looting going on. The question that we started asking is, “What's the scale?” “Where is it happening?” And “Why is it happening?” As I've been doing this research, I've learned this is not a straight-forward black or white issue. What would we do if we were villagers and times were hard? What would we do to feed our families? This is an issue that's tied in very deeply with economic development, with local opportunities for individuals, education. We can't really point the finger at any one individual or any one entity. This is something much more complicated than that.

My work started off being focused on two main sites. One area being the pyramid fields just south of Cairo and an area called el-Lisht, which is about two hours south of Cairo. It's a very well-known zone for the Middle Kingdom, roughly 1800 BC. But since then, it's expanded. I'll talk more about that shortly. Here you see before and after imagery. We have to be very careful when we're doing this mapping in recognizing when looting has happened, when it has taken place, and acknowledging that a lot of looting that's gone on in Egypt and elsewhere of course has been going on for a long time. Fortunately, I had really good satellite imagery coverage for most of the main areas of Egypt, and also, there's wonderful open source online access to satellite data with resources like Google Earth and NASA's Visible Earth program. This data is available to everyone all over the world. You can see comparing this image, this is from south Abu Seer, just a little bit south of Cairo. This is an image from 2009. The image on the right is an image from February 15th, 2011. And you can see there are about 220 looting pits. It's pretty easy to see it. You see a black rectangle surrounded by a doughnut of earth. We go in, we actually use a tool, draw the number of looting pits, you can actually see in the upper right-hand corner, bulldozing marks, which is, again, a sign of more organized activity. This is another thing we're tracking, who's doing the looting? Is it gangs of youths going in digging up a few looting pits, trying to find treasure, versus organized criminal activity? What we're seeing in Egypt, and indeed in many parts of the world, is that looting is changing. It is a global problem, and it is something that has deep connections with global criminal activities.

With the support of Deborah at the Capitol Archeological Institute and the International Coalition for the Protection of Egyptian Antiquities, at the very kind invitation of Egypt's foreign ministry, in May of 2011, we went to Egypt to meet with a number of officials and also to visit some of these looting pits on the ground. A really critical part of satellite imagery, of course, is ground truthing. You go and you examine for yourself to see, is what the satellite imagery is showing what you think it is. What people might not know is the incredible deep knowledge that local people in Egypt have of their history. Many individuals, as it turns out, who were involved with the looting, or at least we think were involved with the looting, had experience with archaeological excavations. They knew where to look for tombs. You can see us standing in front of it. That's definitely my unhappy face. I prefer to be digging. You can see it's fairly deep. They knew exactly where to go. The big question, then, is “Were these tombs intact?” How can we really know if, when we get there, they're empty? You can see where I'm standing on the left-hand side, you can see bits of human bone, little bits from sarcophagi, broken pottery. By the way, you can't see it from this picture, but they had fresh breaks, so I think many of these tombs that have been looted actually were partially to almost fully intact. This gets at a really crucial issue for mapping archaeological site looting all over the world. The most important thing that we need is an inventory. Not just of the objects, which is absolutely crucial, but an inventory of the number of archaeological sites in that country. And what may be shocking to hear is that there's no single country in the entire world that has a comprehensive database of every single known archaeological site. This is the 21st century. This information should be open, it should be online, and we simply don't have this information.

I want to show you a little bit about how much things have changed in the last three years at one particular site and then talk to you about what we're doing about this right now. And how we're hoping that this work will change public perceptions and hopefully, in working in conjunction with the Egyptian Government, begin to protect some of these sites that are under threat. This is an image of a very well known archaeological zone, Dahshur. They're a series of Middle Kingdom pyramids, again these are from roughly 1800 BC. The top image is from 2009. You can see the tip of a pyramid, just the black edge just to the south of the image, you see what looks like looting pits. Those aren't. Those are actually exposed tomb shafts. And things look okay, you don't see much looting. Flash ahead to May of 2011. We're starting to see some looting pits. Not many, maybe 15 or 20. Not too bad. 2012, maybe 100 to 150 pits. But 2013, things start getting really bad. We see about 450 to 500 looting pits, and even more concerning is the significant extension of the cemetery. This is an illegal cemetery. This is a big problem in Egypt and in many parts of the world. There simply aren't enough places for the Egyptians to bury their dead, so there's a lot of illegal encroachment on archaeological sites. What do we do about this? How do we begin to map this problem?

With generous funding from National Geographic, we are in the midst of the first comprehensive looting mapping project for an entire country. We're using satellite imagery that's openly available and online, using Google Earth, as well as additional sources, and we're going back 12 years in time, from 2002 to the present. And we're looking at every known archaeological site in Egypt plus many thousands of others that I've been able to find through my research, and looking at the history of site looting all over Egypt. And what's fascinating, right now, if you don't know the time period of a looted site, you simply can't begin to think about what objects might be looted from it, and you can't inform Interpol and the Carabinieri and US Customs and international authorities as to what might be taken. What we do know from all of these thousands of known sites is their time period. So we can go to international entities and say, “We have 57 sites from 600 BC that have extensive site looting. Here is a typical tomb group from the late period. It would have a stone sarcophagus. Here are the types of pottery that come from that particular site. Here are the shabtis, here are other objects and artifacts from that time period.” So we can begin, from space, even though we can't zoom in and see a single pot. Based on the time period known from that site, we can begin to come up with inventories for international authorities to look for. What about more broadly?

With generous funding from the National Science Foundation, I will be working directly with the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities to set up training programs for young Egyptians. These are the men and the women that are really the true unsung culture heroes of post- and pre-revolution Egypt. There's a gentleman named Omar Farouk, who's a very dear friend of mine. He is our head fixer in Luxor. His family has been doing archaeological work in Egypt for 150 years. His great-grandfather was Petrie's reis, the chief-boss Egyptian who worked with Petrie, the grandfather of Egyptian archaeology. Omar and a group of young men, just after the revolution started, were under gunfire, an attack, at Karnak Temple in Luxor. And they actually managed to fight off a gang of looters, risking their own lives to protect this site. There are so many dozens of stories like that all over Egypt so we're hoping through educational initiatives to work with young Egyptian men and women, to provide them tools and resources like Google Earth and other resources for them to be able to take part in protecting their sites.

So more broadly, what do we do? We're hoping that this is just the first step. What we want to do is we want to create crowd-sourcing opportunities for the world, so it's not just me and my students doing this work in my lab, but actually students and individuals from all over the world can help in the search for looting everywhere. We also want to emphasize just how important it is for countries all over the world to have good site-inventories. Because if you don't know where your sites are, how in the world can you begin to protect them? While I would love to get back to my search for settlements and pyramids, this is very important for me, and certainly something that I know I will be devoting the rest of my life to doing, and with new technologies and new advancements, this is something that simply would not have been possible 15 to 20 years ago. I think the urgency is here. It's time for our generation to do something about this. Because as we've been able to map, every day we're mapping thousands of looting pits, we're seeing over a 1000% increase in site looting since the start of the revolution. And billions of dollars in antiquities that we've estimated to date, that have been stolen. And if we think this is Egypt alone, and you begin to scale that, all over the world, I couldn't give a number right now off the top of my head, but it would be very large. This is a global issue, and the time is now to do something about it. Thank you very much.

Culture Heroes: Sarah Parcak

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.